Friday, 29 May 2009

Penance

Yesterday, in "Tom's flora and fauna" post I wrote that after surveying the yard all hell broke loose and I ended up on the phone with the guys at the summit trying to fix a problem. Well, I certainly fixed it, but today I found out that I was the one that caused the problem in the first place! Oops.

Oh well, just deserts as they say, although I also ended up spoiling someone else's early evening at home for which I apologise profusely. During some end-of-day checks before the observers got going at night I managed to accidentally hit the wrong software button which resulted in some spectacularly unpredictable symptoms and a broken telescope.

These things happen although I've always taken pride in making sure operations run as smoothly as possible. What's even more ironic about this is that I screwed up during the end of day checks which are supposed to catch problems before we observe at night, and it was during these checks that I caused the problem! Fortunately I managed to get the observers on sky again before it got really dark, but boy, I feel bad about this.

Do you want even more irony? I was the one that developed and instituted these checks in the first place. Don't worry, I've slapped my forehead a number of times today.

The punishment is self-imposed - my Friday and Saturday evenings will be spent making sure things run as well as they can. Actually, that was always the plan, I'm the on-call person right now, but I have to make this up somehow!

At least tonight's sunset looked interesting from my home at sea level, but it turned out to be a really boring view in the end. Oh well, I'll accept the punishment and I'll never make the same mistake again.

Incidentally, the picture at the top was captured by the north facing webcam at the NOAA Mauna Loa Observatory at sunset this evening (it points towards Mauna Kea). My sunset view from home was so boring I'm not even going to bother posting it.

I'm back on Mauna Kea late Sunday, so perhaps I can take a couple of nice pictures then.